Conference Program of WCICA 2012

WCICA 2012
Pre-conference Workshops
Workshop III
9:00-12:00, Thursday, July 5, 2012
Room 106, Postgraduate Building, Beijing Institute of Technology
Control System Design: From Concepts to Practice, a Historical,
Humanistic, Practical, and Rational Account
Chair: Zhiqiang Gao, Cleveland State University, USA
Abstract
This is an abbreviated short course on history, concepts and practice of controls for students, professionals,
and practicing engineers who aspire to become a creative problem solver through better understanding
of the historical and human side of this profession as it evolved from 1780s. Fundamental
concepts and problem solving skills are grasped through the lens of history, as we witness how the ingenious
minds rose to the occasion and made the arts and crafts of controls effective, intelligible, and maybe
even reproducible. Today, just as two hundred years ago, great solutions for the complex problems in the
real world are not to be found in a few rules of thumb or a few textbook formulas, but through human
ingenuity and free thinking. This course is designed to inspire, to unlock the minds, to question what has
always been done, and to see in history what it takes to be a truly innovative engineering problem solver,
operating within a given framework and beyond.
Description of Workshop
Lecture: Prof. Zhiqiang Gao, Cleveland State University, USA
I. The Concepts of Control: A Two Hundred Year Evolution
∙ What concepts, where did they come from, what questions did they answer?
∙ Feedback: consistent performance in a system made of inconsistent parts
∙ Feedforward? - the art of anticipation and active control
∙ Feedback and Feedforward: the twin evolution from 1788 to present
∙ The story of active disturbance rejection and the story of an enduring idea: from Jean-Victor Poncelet,
to Grigoriy Shipanov, and to Jingqing Han
II. The Three Paradigms In Control System Design
∙ A control problem is a disturbance rejection problem
∙ Three paradigms: industrial, academic and disturbance rejection
∙ The inherent uncertainty in physical process and its centrality in control design
∙ What we need to know about a physical process in order to control it: effective action without perfect
information
∙ Dealing with uncertainties
– PID tuning
– Modeling and Robust Control
– Estimating/mitigating
∙ Anticipatory vs. reactive control
III. Why the Basic Concepts and Skills Matter
∙ The language of our understanding: diff. equation, transfer function, state space
∙ Vocabulary of engineers: PID, feedforward, bandwidth, error budget ...
∙ What we want: performance-stability and aggressiveness-energy trade-offs
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